


Now I'm Lost In A Sea Of Sunken Dreams

by ialpiriel



Category: Pillars of Eternity
Genre: Accidental Mind Reading, Dissociation, F/F, Flashbacks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-14
Updated: 2017-07-14
Packaged: 2018-12-01 23:14:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11496798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ialpiriel/pseuds/ialpiriel
Summary: Nella has a hard tiem keeping reality in just one place. Maneha and Pallegina offer some comfort





	Now I'm Lost In A Sea Of Sunken Dreams

“Hey, Nella.” Maneha bends down, taps the desk in front of Nella, who startles and shakes her head, grunts softly.

“Sorry,” she says, rubs at her cheeks. “I--mm.” She shakes her head. Maneha leans against the desk, reaches out one hand. Nella laces their fingers together, keeps rubbing at her eyes. “I--got distracted.”

“You should go to bed.” Maneha tugs at Nella’s hand. “It’s late and you have visitors tomorrow.”

“It’s been a bad day,” Nella says, and stands. Maneha stands too, and hesitates for a moment before pulling Nella into a hug. She rubs Nella’s back, slow, deep pressure from the small of her back, up to her shoulders, then back down. Nella sags into it, drapes her arms over Maneha’s shoulders, presses her nose and mouth against the side of Maneha’s neck.

“Pallegina’s already in bed, she’s been there for-” And whatever Maneha says next is gone in a flash of color and laughter, a half dozen children playing tag together, dashing through the streets, ducking through the storefronts, screaming and laughing and insisting they _hadn’t_ been tagged, really, you’re a _cheater_ , and the tackling fights and going home to cry and getting back together the next morning to do it all over. Flashing images of the prettiest girl in the neighborhood--a year older, with dark blue skin and darker blue patterns, dark hair braided and held back with a pretty pink ribbon--sitting behind the garbage pile in the alley, the two of you eating sweets nicked from one of the street stands. Her older brother shoving you into a gutter, laughing as his friends do, attacking him back--a sweep through his ankles, hitting him in the face, biting his hand when he tries to shove you off, drawing blood and spitting after him when he runs home crying.

Nella jerks away, pulls herself out of Maneha’s arms

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she gasps. She leans over, feels the nausea welling up the back of her throat, puts her hands on her knees. She closes her eyes, tries to breathe evenly. “Sorry,” she whimpers.

“Whoa, whoa, what happened?” Maneha tries to tug Nella upright, and Nella waves her hand off.

“Read you. Didn’t mean to, sorry.”

“I didn’t even notice. Come on, let’s go.”

“Gimme a minute,” Nella insists, stays bent over, breathing. She can feel tears prickling in her eyes. “Don’t feel good.” She laughs, leans a little further forward. “Kinda pukey.”

“That’s no good,” Maneha agrees, laughs. She turns to stand next to Nella, rubs her back briskly, between her shoulder blades. “Is it getting harder to control?”

“On some days more than others,” Nella agrees, and fumbles her way back to her chair. Maneha follows. “Lost a lot of today remembering.”

“You can come remember in bed, when you feel better.”

Nella snorts, swallows.

“I won’t be very good bed company.”

“Oh, come on, you’ve gotta have some good stories in there.” Maneha kneels down next to Nella’s chair, puts her arms across Nella’s shoulders.

Nella laughs a little, leans into the touch.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“I’ll stay here until you feel good enough to walk back over to Brighthollow.”

“Thanks,” Nella murmurs, rubs at her face again. She can feel the tug of some past life at the edges of her mind, tries to focus on Maneha’s hand on her back.

***

Pallegina is closest to the fire, and only sets her book aside when Nella slides under the flannel blanket, presses herself up against Pallegina, who _humph_ s quietly and wraps Nella in her arms.

Maneha follows Nella into bed, maneuvers around her horn to press a kiss against the back of her head.

“Tell us a story,” Maneha insists, wraps her arms around Nella. Pallegina scoots closer, too, until Nella is firmly pinned between the two of them, confined in a wind of arms and legs.

“I’m sure someone in my head has one,” Nella replies, can already feel the grin creeping across her face as Maneha mouths more kisses down toward the nape of her neck, and Pallegina tries to tilt her head so they can kiss mouth-to-mouth. It’s short, but wet, and Pallegina and Nella both pull away smiling. She settles deeper into the feather tick, managed five seconds of luxuriating in the warmth before she feels the tug at the edges of her thoughts again. “What sort of story do you want?” she asks. Better to lean into it than spend even more time trying to fight it off. The tick smells like feathers, and Pallegina smells like feathers too, and the skin of Maneha’s palms slides rough over her side.

“One where you’re a hero,” Maneha finally says, having run her hand up and down Nella’s side twice. “Maybe you slay an entire herd of xaurips singlehandedly.”

“I don’t think I have a story like that,” Nella murmurs, but lets her grip on herself as-is start to slip away, tries to fix the image of a xaurip in her mind.

“There was a whole troop near our vill--” and her own mind cuts her off, sends her spiralling into someone else’s memories in a rattle of steel and Vailian and heavy boots on cobblestones, a flash of bright blue sky and whitewashed stucco, the green moss growing up between the cracks in the cobbles, one of the boys--taller, stronger, meaner, older, standing over her, laughing, an instructor heckling nearby, telling her to get up, though this is the third time she’s been knocked down. She bit the inside of her cheek last time, and she can still taste the blood. She spits at the boy’s feet, rolls onto her hands and knees, rolls away when he aims a kick at her side, jumps to her feet, presses the attack. She has longer legs, longer arms, can move faster. Something in his face flickers, so faint the rest of the boys around them don’t see it, but she does--a flicker of uncertainty, a twitch of his arm, and she dives for him, claws at his neck and chest, wallops him across the face so he hits the ground, and they scuffle in the dirt for a moment before--

“Nella?”

She’s on her back, can feel the sweat trickling down between her shoulderblades, and Pallegina is sitting up, halfway down the bed, blankets pulled away, and Maneha sits on her other side, one of Nella’s hands gripped tight in her own.

“I--I--I--” Nella stammers, but she can’t manage any other words, just squeezes Maneha’s hand tighter.

“it is alright,” Pallegina murmurs, lays back down, drapes one arm across Nella’s chest. “Rest. No stories tonight.”

“Don’t know if I can sleep,” Nella says, laughs a little. It’s forced, rough, and she lets go of Maneha’s hand. Behind her, Pallegina inches closer, presses her nose and mouth against the back of Nella’s head, starts to hum something softly. Maneha rolls over, scoots back until her back is against Nella’s chest, and Nella lets herself go, tries to breathe evenly, deeply, stops clinging to this moment, and she drifts off in the memory of some mother’s arms, a soft melody filling her head, her chest, slowly lulling her to sleep.


End file.
